THE CHAIRMAN OF a centre for adults with special needs has apologised for an incident where a service-user was mistakenly locked in a minibus for seven hours.

The young woman was supposed to be dropped off for the day at the Moore Haven Centre in Tipperary town last Monday – but was instead driven back to the bus garage, where she was found seven hours later.

She was said to be in a distressed state in the aftermath of the incident, and didn’t attend the centre the following day as she recovered from her ordeal.

Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, the chairman of Moore Haven, Denis Kennedy, said it had been an ‘unacceptable lapse’ on their part and that changes in procedure were being brought in to make sure such an incident could never happen again.

“It happened because essentially she was picked up near her home, arrived at Moore Haven, and unfortunately the bus wasn’t checked to make sure everyone had disembarked.”

I suppose there were two failures – one that it wasn’t checked after after everyone got off, and secondly that the centre did not have a procedure in place to make sure that everyone who got on the bus actually arrived in the centre – which obviously is a major lapse on our part.

He said that in the future, buses arriving at the centre would be thoroughly checked, and that staff would contact the families of any service-user who failed to show up on their appointed attendance days.

Asked how the young woman at the centre of the controversy was feeling following her ordeal, Mr Kennedy said she was ‘fine’ and that he had spoken to her family a number of times over the weekend.

He said she was expected to attend the facility for the day, as normal, and would be accompanied from her home by a staff member.

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